Angela Cropper, brilliant student, committed environmentalist and scholarly author of crucial policy matters, died a week ago in London. Most public awareness of her in this country is a memory of tragedy, but her life was defined by courage, forgiveness and a determination that's rare to find anywhere in the world.
Her brilliance was respected by her colleagues in environmental studies and in the last 15 years of her life alone, Angela Cropper won the Zayed Prize for Environmental Action Leading to Positive Change in Society, served as a Visiting Fellow at the Woods Hole Research Center, Massachusetts, and was McCluskey Fellow and Member of the Faculty at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
The last five years were committed to the UN, where she worked on the UN Environmental Programme as a senior adviser on Environment and Development from 2007 to 2011, continuing after retirement as a special adviser. From 2002 to 2007 she served as an Independent Senator in Trinidad and Tobago and her many thoughtful contributions there, unadorned with the theatre of politics, stand in the public record if not in any notable Government action.
A top-shelf developmental economics graduate of UWI, St Augustine, Angela Cropper plunged into social activism as part of the Tapia House Group, a bold and unequivocal woman in a political landscape that was still, even in an era of nascent gender awareness, very much a man's world.
She married, had a son and worked as a research officer at the Caribbean Industrial Research Institute. In the 1980s she served as a director at the Caribbean Community secretariat where she pushed programmes in health, culture, education, training and the development of women to measurable results.
From 1991-1993, Angela Cropper was Head of Governance for the International Union for Conservation of Nature and would serve as the IUCN's Deputy Chair from 1997-1998. An efficient and capable technocrat, Mrs Cropper was notable for taking the larger view of problems and seeking answers that put pressure at the fulcrum points of difficult situations.
In 1998 her son, Devanand, died of a rare heart condition. After mourning the loss of her child, a well-regarded and promising young man, John and Angela Cropper then offered a memorial award in his name at the London School of Economics and founded The Cropper Foundation which would provide a local anchor for her interests in sustainable development, and environmental and resource management.
Just four years later, her husband, mother and sister were brutally murdered in a shocking multiple homicide at her family's home in Cascade. Two men were convicted of the murders of John Cropper, Maggie Lee and Lynette Lithgow and sentenced to hang.
Confronted with this challenge to her abolitionist views on the death penalty, Angela Cropper saluted a stay of execution for one of the men, noting that "the death penalty will not solve the country's crime problems." "Life," Angela Cropper told students of UWI when she accepted her Honorary Doctorate in the Faculty of Science and Agriculture, "is about more than personal advantage."
That was the motto of The Cropper Foundation, the institution she has left behind to continue her life's commitment to environmental research and sustainable development. Angela Cropper offered her life in the pursuit of her passions and in giving back, to her country, to the planet, while stoutly denying the grim fates that took her son and the murderers who took her closest family from her.
In the Foundation's tenth anniversary publication she described the act of giving back to her country as "not a luxury, but a responsibility." Her rigorous, patient and firm voice has now been stilled, but we need not lose its resonance, nor should we allow the gifts of her wisdom and the richness of her life's work to be lost to us.
